Control in Chaos, a Strength essay
Strength is by and large the most misunderstood fitness attribute of the general population.
This might seem like a good opportunity to just point people in the direction of our Strength Manual, which delves deep into the ideas and concepts about how to attain strength in a practical manner, but we happen to be sold out (I don’t even have an example issue to share). That, and if I’m being honest, I am not totally satisfied with our first edition so I am revising it. Part of the revision process for me is to try and comprehend what is stopping people from developing such a widely revered skill and expression.
I imagine our following has a bit higher aptitude than the average person about fitness, but there are familiar traps in thinking about strength vs knowing it. And I see more often than not, a general understanding of the physiology and traditional training methods leads the average person further from understanding rather than closer.
The most difficult concept for the average person to understand is that strength—as a physical attribute—is an internally derived task, NOT just a reaction to external pressure. It is an expectation of sensation that comes from exposure to familiar levels of contraction rates. But modern training techniques have diluted and standardized strength development to be an untransferable expression of formal patterns. Generalized strength cannot be developed properly through narrow and specific means. We understand this when someone says “Don’t skip leg day” but we seem to forget it when someone else offers “Don’t just do sagittal plane movements.” The gap here is that whatever tissue is not exposed to a range of motion or a contraction rate will remain underdeveloped.
To the uninitiated, strength as a topic might be taught by the “experts” as a willpower problem. They often—incorrectly—over-simplify your lack of development as “You just need to lift heavy weight,” or insinuate that strength development can happen only within the confines of a gym. But this sets the student up with a false premise. This is the equivalent of saying “You need to work to make money,” or to assume that money is only made in the confines of a factory or office, which has some truth to it but it is not the cause or creation of the attribute. And just like strength, you can do any number of things to acquire it. The barbell or “the work” might be the most common path but without further understanding or a personalized definition of expression, it often leads to a dead end, much like most “work.”
Strength, like money, is about understanding leverage. It is first and foremost an idea about what you want to move, or what you don’t want to move (like your spine under load); what it will cost to move it or hold it (risk), and what the return on your investment will be (ability). It is a concept, not a formula. A creative act of personal capability, not a concretized recipe. How you attain it will dictate what you can do with it. And I would hate to belabor the analogy but also like money, if I choose to attain it a certain way, with a “shortcut” or illegally, I will be limited in how I can use it. If I attain strength through a rigid format and enhanced exogenous aid, my expression will be narrow and contingent on the pharmaceuticals and objects I used to develop it. More risk, limited reward.
This means that your idea of strength and where it comes from is paramount, more important than another’s idea of it — unless you are adopting their idea as your own. No one can teach YOU about strength that can’t exhibit the qualities that you define it as (just watch the fumes rise if you ask a competitive powerlifter if they can planche or if gymnastics is a strength sport). Both genres of athletes can express great feats of strength, but if they agreed on their idea of strength, we wouldn’t have two totally different sports. This is probably the root of the problem, our society rarely displays strength. When it does, it is a circus trick at best, a subculture that is defined by a look and a manufactured goal that gets distilled to the masses as “the way.”.
These “displays of strength” or strength sports are certainly a function of the physical qualities but they are far removed from our real-world need to apply them; which is the ability to control ourselves (our bodies) in a world where we can’t control anything. As the ancient Greeks might say “Cosmos in Chaos.” This is quite literally the stuff of legends and it is also why preparing to be strong at a specific time on the right day, with an exact movement does not seem heroic, it seems made-up and arbitrary because it is. Strength, whether you like it or not, is a challenge worth accepting because the test that you will need it for is unknown. Strength is a physical quality, but a psychological manifestation, and an archetypical attribute of mythology, it defines what a human can do when they leave the ordinary world and enter into the extraordinary universe of resistance. Strength, in one way or another—physical, emotional, or psychological—plays into how we change ourselves.
Reps, sets, and percentages are a prescription that can help ONLY after you have an idea of what your strength is for. To most people, common exercise patterns do not resemble the real life they are seeking physical control of. What percentage of a maximum of “I don’t want to fuck up my back picking up groceries” do I do my 5x5s at? Letting scientific research in highly specific fields dictate how you attain an attribute that you can’t even define will not lead to a good outcome. And this failure of good outcomes has presented itself with a population that is the weakest our species has ever been, despite the tools and science that should suggest otherwise.
I know more people that are healthy and capable that do NOT do formal strength progressions than I know who do. This — as a strength coach — is baffling to me. And it is mostly because I am guilty of pushing the same rhetoric with the “king of exercises” and “the deadlift is a health lift” as many others did because I read the research, and I was “science-based.” It took me 10 years to formulate my own idea of strength. Most of that time was spent removing the ideas that didn’t serve me like expressing strength as some arbitrary act on a barbell, or thinking that strength is somehow outside of myself, as opposed to nurtured internally.
If strength is confusing to you. If you don’t know what movements and what weight, or how many sets are correct, just chill. You are correct in being confused because you haven’t yet defined this attribute for yourself. My advice is to do so. What do you want to be able to resist? What kind of outside pressure can you withstand with resilience? I can out-pull and out-push many JiuJitsu players my same size in the world of arbitrary loaded movements—because that is how I defined it for years—but they have decided that allowing someone like myself to move their arm one inch in any direction they don’t want is unacceptable. Their idea of strength manifests as a strength because they have defined it more specifically than I have. Do they do 10x10 resisting Kimura attacks? No. They put themselves in a position of strength expression frequently and they try really hard to resist. What they do have is an idea of what strength looks like to them and that is more valuable than any progressive program. But if the random person looking to get strong copied their idea of strength and started randomly wrestling with people at the gym, but didn’t understand “why?” their risk of injury would be exponentially high, as it is with people who randomly do squats and deads without a basis of what they are trying to improve.
I do believe there are specific actions one can take for optimal results. There are progressions that lead to world-class performances. And there are certainly wrong ways to do it. But almost none of this matters if you can’t develop an idea of what strength is to you, about what you would like to see yourself do. This is the most transferable attribute of strength: an idea about yourself in a world that you can’t control. Develop that idea and you will be stronger.
